Events
Student-led initiatives and innovative research projects were highlights of the Klau Institute’s event schedule this year, along with collaborative events that helped our community explore a broad range of important human rights issues.
April 21: 50th Anniversary Student Showcase
Kicking off our commemoration of the Klau Institute’s 50th anniversary, a showcase of student affiliates and their work welcomed the Keough School community in the Jenkins Nanovic forum.
Designed to complement the spring meeting of our Advisory Board, the showcase featured students representing a wide range of disciplines and research topics, and included projects undertaken by students at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels from across the university.
November 2: Midterm Debate
The Klau Institute provided support for the 2022 Notre Dame Midterm debate, a campus-wide project sponsored by College Democrats, College Republicans, BridgeND, Student Government, and NDVotes, a project of the Klau Institute. Before an audience at Duncan Student Center, College Republicans representative Shri Thakur and College Democrats representative Blake Ziegler sparred over inflation, abortion, and crime in a spirited debate ahead of the midterm elections.
November 28: Race, Rights, and Great Power Politics
An innovative research project pursued by the International Race and Rights Lab, led by Zoltán Búzás with support from the Klau Institute, probes Chinese media to tease out how race and human rights are used to try to shape opinion. A team of student researchers shared its initial findings with the Keough School in the fall of 2022.
Seeking to tie attitudes toward race and human rights to a larger conversation about geopolitical power, Búzás noted that existing research fails to make the connections. “Studies of great power politics do a great job of emphasizing and engaging with aspects of economic competition and the military dimensions of great power competition. Studies of human rights and race offer great theoretical resources to understand that civil rights are not domestically confined. These two bodies of work are impressive individually, but they have not talked much to each other. We want to bring research in great power politics, and human rights and race, into conversation with each other.”
Research assistants participating in the event included Nourhan Fahmy, a master of global affairs student at the Keough School; Matthew Ruff, a political science major; and Abby Lamm, a global affairs and political science student.
March 2: Protecting All Women’s Rights
The continued oppression of women’s rights around the world and a call for change were the themes of this panel co-sponsored by Notre Dame Law School and the Klau Institute. Margarette May Macaulay, the newly elected president for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, spoke about continued violence against women and young girls and the lack of women in influential civic and legal positions. “It is vitally important to recognize that human rights must begin by ensuring that all women, in all stages of life and diversity of races, are included in every discourse, policy making, and the amending and framing of the law, said Macaulay. “We must demand this as a right.”
In closing remarks, Klau Institute director Jennifer Mason McAward asked the audience to consider an important question. “How is each of you during your time at Notre Dame going to grapple with these questions?” asked McAward. “How do these questions form you into a graduate of Notre Dame and prompt you to do something to advance the rights of women and children?”
Human Rights Lunch and Learn Talks
Our lunch and learn talks, in which LL.M. students explore human rights issues in their home countries, continued in the 2022-23 academic year with stories that reached from Guatemala to Sri Lanka and covered a broad range of concerns.
November 17: Ana Rivero, Overcrowded Prisons in Argentina
December 1: Pavithra Rajendran, Sri Lanka: Untold Stories of the Upcountry
February 7: Faisel Meneses, Sanctions and Human Rights in Venezuela
February 17: Carlos Martinez Roca, Human Rights Defenders in Guatemala
April 3: Yin Yin Win, The Right to Education Under Attack in Myanmar
April 13: Fast Fashion and Global Supply Chains
Justine Nolan, director of the Australian Human Rights Institute and a professor of law at the University of New South Wales Sydney, engaged via Zoom with a student panel. Nolan shared her expertise at the nexus of labor justice, consumption, and climate change. The event was conceived and managed by the Klau Institute Student Leadership Team.
Observing the 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster, in which a clothing manufacturing facility in Bangladesh collapsed, killing over 1,000 workers, Nolan remarked, “The question for us today is, could the same thing happen again now, despite the advances that we’ve seen in the last decade? And I think the answer is yes, because we still have multiple issues in global supply chains, and particularly in the fashion sector.”
While the need for global change is unquestionable, Nolan is guarded in her optimism. “The whole human rights mechanism is built on having a global standard, which is often quite broad, and not necessarily enforceable, which then filters down to local level,” she said. “I have more faith in domestically based local laws and change. That pressure then helps change governments.”
Additional Events
September 22: Voices from Ukraine: A conversation with Ukrainian students at Notre Dame (co-sponsored with Nanovic Institute for European Studies)
September 23: Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty in America: A Fireside Chat with Sister Helen Prejean (co-sponsored with Notre Dame Law School’s Exoneration Clinic)
October 10: The Uyghur Genocide & Threats to Religious Liberty: A Conversation with Commissioner Nury Turkel (co-sponsored with Notre Dame Religious Liberty Initiative, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, and Depatrtment of Political Science)
October 11: Film: Watchers of the Sky
November 17: An Evening with Ericka Huggins (co-sponsored with Center for Social Concerns, Department of Africana Studies, Department of American Studies, Department of Education, Schooling, and Society, Initiative on Race and Resilience, Transformational Leadership Program)
January 17: Walking in the Spirit of Truth: Charting the Pathways to Racial Justice (co-sponsored with Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies)
January 31: Film: BOYCOTT (co-sponsored with Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies)
February 10: The Housing Continuum of Care: Enhancing Low-Barrier Shelter and Supportive Housing Options (co-sponsored with University of Notre Dame, Our Lady of the Road, and Housing Matters)
February 28: Healing a Wounded World: Baha’i (co-sponsored with Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, and Department of American Studies)
March 8: Unlocking Potential: International Perspectives on Education in Prison (co-sponsored with Center for Social Concerns and Nanovic Institute for European Studies)
March 9: The Weaponization of Law (co-sponsored with LGBT Legal Forum)
March 24: “Respecting All Life: Innocent and Guilty” with Sr. Helen Prejean (co-sponsored with Center for Social Concerns)
April 20: Struggle for the Country’s Soul: Christian Nationalism in a Changing America (co-sponsored with Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy, Hesburgh Program, and LGBT Legal Forum)